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David had just moved to the Animorphs hometown and began attending their school. On his way home from school one day, he had the misfortune of finding the Blue Box in the abandoned construction site where Elfangor died. When he tried to sell it on the Internet, Visser Three showed up at his house to claim it. The Animorphs intervened and escaped with the Escafil Device and David, but were forced to leave his parents to be infested.[1]

David had now seen too much to go free and could never again return to his normal life. Realizing this, the Animorphs debated between two choices: make him one of them or abandon him to the Yeerks. They narrowly decided to let him join their ranks, but David chafed under the authority of his saviors and slowly began to resent them. Forced to live in Cassie's barn and forbidden to go out in public as himself, David began using his morphing power to achieve the illusion of normal life again, even if it meant committing crimes in the process.[2]

The growing schism between David and the Animorphs came to a head when the team was cornered by Visser Three on a mission. Desperate to survive, David attempted to negotiate with the Visser and turned against his teammates. He later took advantage of an opportunity to attack Visser Three, and after the mission rationalized his actions as a bluff, but the Animorphs no longer trusted him so he decided to rebel. In a single night David slayed a red-tailed hawk he thought was the Animorph Tobias, defeated Jake in a duel between his lion and Jake's tiger, captured and acquired Marco, almost killed Ax with a baseball bat, and would have killed Rachel in their fight between his golden eagle and her great horned owl if Tobias had not intervened and driven David off.[3]

Confident from his one-man assault, David attempted to negotiate with the Animorphs to reclaim the blue box. He then schemed to regain a normal life by acquiring and posing as Saddler, a cousin of Jake and Rachel's, barely alive after a car accident. In order to defeat David for good, the Animorphs manipulated his arrogance and insecurity to trap him in the body of a white rat. After he was trapped, the Animorphs abandoned him on a desolate rock in the middle of the ocean, with only other rats and his despair for company.[4]

Many months later, as the war with the Yeerks was nearing its end, David escaped the island through the intervention of the extra-dimensional being Crayak. Crayak made a deal with David: if David could persuade Rachel to abandon her friends and serve him, then Crayak would restore David to his human form. To accomplish this, David recruited two henchmen, used Crayak's influence to capture Rachel and Cassie, and then wove a story about being able to command other rats. Unfortunately for him, Rachel saw through this ruse and refused to submit to either David or Crayak himself. Crayak abandoned David and withdrew, leaving him still trapped in the rat body and facing the mercies of his worst enemy. Unwilling to continue living as a rat, David begged Rachel to kill him. Rachel's decision, and David's final fate, were never revealed.[5]

As a combatant, David was aggressive and reckless, favoring a battle style similar to that of Rachel. While capable of approaching battle in a tactical manner, he preferred to just overwhelm his opponents with savage force. This was demonstrated in David's battle morphs for land, sea, and air: the lion, orca, and golden eagle respectively. All are apex predators, large and dangerous. David generally preferred large and powerful morphs as a rule, and did not hesitate to morph other human beings as well, in violation of the Animorphs' code of conduct.

David's predilection for apex predators can be seen in the very first morph he chose - the golden eagle. He chose the golden eagle specifically because it was the largest and most powerful bird that Cassie had available at the clinic, despite the other Animorphs advising him that the other possible morph, a merlin, would be more agile and useful in flight. His main battle morph was a lion, which surpassed Jake's tiger in terms of combat ability and had the additional advantage that the lion's mane protected him from attempts to attack his vulnerable throat.

When David turned against the Animorphs, his morphs came in handy. David first killed a red-tailed hawk (mistaking it for Tobias) while in golden eagle morph. His lion morph gave him an advantage against Jake's tiger when they battled in the mall. David also morphed an orca to battle the Animorphs; the Animorphs morphed into dolphins to both invade and retreat, and the orca gave David a massive advantage. Luckily Cassie was able to use her old humpback whale morph to drive him off. A rattlesnake gave him the perfect morph to not only spy on the Animorphs, but threaten them while they were in smaller, more vulnerable morphs.

In addition to all of the above morphs, David had the usual transportation and infiltration morphs that the other Animorphs had, such as a cockroach, a seagull, and a flea. He also acquired a random male Human-Controller for one infiltration mission. David was eventually trapped as a rat nothlit.

Marco's first impression of David is that he's a kid with an attitude. The impression isn't inaccurate - David's primary character trait throughout his appearances is his fiercely independent nature. He respected the authority of his father, but exhibited no respect or deference towards any other authority figure. He undermined Jake's authority as leader of the Animorphs several times and told Marco he didn't tell him what to do. This independent nature ended up driving a wedge between him and the Animorphs.

David was motivated primarily by self-interest, further setting him apart from the other Animorphs. Shortly after becoming an Animorph David suggested using morphing as a means to steal money and valuables, and his ultimate plan was to take back the blue box from the Animorphs and create a gang of morph-capable thieves which he would then lead. This plan highlights David's habit of underestimating others; he never considered the possibility that his new "subordinates" would betray him as he had the Animorphs and could not come up with a retort when Rachel suggested it. Beneath this selfishness, though, David was driven by a deeper desire: the need to reclaim the normal life he lost. He went to extreme measures to recreate the simulation of a normal life, first breaking into hotels and later impersonating Saddler in order to have something akin to a normal life again.

As he became more distrustful of the Animorphs, David revealed a ruthless and arrogant personality. He had some loose scruples - he stated that he would never attack a human being, although this only protected the Animorphs while they were human, leaving him 'free' to attack while they were morphed. He even drew this distinction when talking about himself, arguing that an occasion where he broke into a motel room wasn't a crime because an eagle had broken the window rather than him. (However, it must be noted that Tobias made this very same distinction about himself a short time earlier, and David may have gotten the notion from him). He was also highly arrogant, dismissing the Animorphs as foolish for focusing on the Yeerks when their powers would allow them to take anything they wanted and repeatedly stating that he was far smarter than any of the Animorphs. This arrogance was used against him. Cassie masterminded the plan to trap him as a rat - she anticipated David's need to build his own ego and humiliate Rachel, which allowed her to manipulate his actions.

Interestingly, David could be said to be an amalgamation of all the other Animorphs in personality - he was decisive and instinctive like Jake, reckless and violent like Rachel, predatory and solitary like Tobias, discerning and manipulative like Cassie, and sarcastic and clever like Marco. These personality traits made David not a very viable member of the team, as he did not mesh well with the group's dynamics. They did, however, make him a survivor, and it can be said that he was perhaps the most dangerous enemy the Animorphs ever faced.

David owns two pets: a fat grey tabby cat named Megadeth and a cobra named Spawn.

In Alternamorphs #2 The Next Passage the narrator is extremely similar to David, finding the morphing cube in the exact same way David did, being forced into the Animorphs in the same way he was, and joining in the exact same period in the story that David joined. In one of the story's bad endings, the narrator is trapped as a fly by Rachel, reflecting David's fate in the main story.